Britons 'not ready to drink less'I'm no fan of Britain's yob culture that thinks that the only way to have a good time is to drink until you throw up and pass out (and not necessarily in that order), but given that this story is about the failure of New Labour to impose a "European drinking culture" on the country with all the consideration that Dr. Pavlov gave to his dogs, I think I shall race my glass.
Scientists working for the US Air Force have already produced T-shirts and underwear that can be worn for weeks at a time without washing, and the technology has now been licensed to a London company, Alexium, to develop for civilian applications.You mean you weren't supposed to wear them that long before? That explains a lot.
We destroyed Saddam Hussein’s history. We went in to his village, his tribe, and we wiped away the footsteps of his lineage. We made sure that Saddam Hussein knows that everything about him, who he was, where he came from has ended. We turned him around and made him watch his footsteps in the sand, watch them disappear as the ocean washed over them. As a man who has reached middle age I feel an emptiness inside of me when I think of this – to watch yourself slowly disappear. It was an insane, almost psychotic cruelty. It was my society that not only did this, but cheered this – we were beating a dog over and over again because he bit us, making him yelp, humiliating him so he no longer had an identity, so that he was an empty shell. And when we knew he was an empty shell, we kept beating, our eyes on fire, snot dripping from our nose, wheezing under the strain of our constant blows. The dog had bitten somebody – he must be made to pay. Nobody regrets what we are doing – because he was a junkyard dog who attacked others.It isn't often that one comes across such a mind-boggling disconnect from anything resembling facts, history, commonsense or even basic decency. It should be cast in Lucite and preserved for all time as the purest strain of moral relativism
The risk is that Benedict will send Turkey's Muslims and much of the Islamic world into paroxysms of fury if there is any perception that the Pope is trying to re-appropriate a Christian center that fell to Muslims.It looks as though re-appropriation is a one-way street.
If that many British Muslims turned out to protest interference with their customs, the Blair government would be bending over backward to please them.
A series of heavy gunbattles between Hamas and Fatah militants broke out in Gaza City early Friday, despite a two-day-old truce that had largely ended factional violence here.Self contradiction; it's a wonderful thing.
If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should.To paraphrase an old Spartan reply, "If."
A Somali asylum seeker wanted for the murder of WPc Sharon Beshenivsky is believed to have fled Britain dressed as a woman wearing a Muslim niqab, which covers the whole face apart from the eyes.The niqab is an icon of versatility; it's not only oppresive, but it makes a great getaway disguise for man or woman!
“Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”Dear God, it's beyond parody!
In a statement, she said that it was the unexpected publicity around her decision that made her change her mind.Pass the eggnog, please.
But a source close to the programme makers said one of the reasons was that she had been pressurised by senior members of the community who felt it was not her place to talk about Islam. It has also been said that she had received threatening letters from non-Muslims accusing her of trying to upstage the Queen.
Commander Dave Johnston, Britain's most senior murder investigator, has suggested that DNA should be taken from infants and put in a database in order to solve future crimes.Bravo. Now all the government needs is to simply make being born a crime and the circle will be complete.
A school in traditionally Catholic Spain has cancelled Christmas celebrations so as not to offend children who are not Christians, ABC newspaper reported on Wednesday.Where is El Cid when you need him?
The Hilarion Gimeno school in Zaragoza said teachers had put forward various reasons for not celebrating Christmas, but ABC said the worry was that Muslim children might be upset.
It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million.
If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us. The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means.This is a vital step in this war. Now let's see if the Mr. Blair backs it up with equally tough action.
(W)hen Muslims beat infidels, it’s just too bad for the latter; they must submit to their new overlords’ rules with all the attendant discrimination and humiliation mandated for non-Muslims. Yet when Islam is beaten, demands for apologies and concessions are expected from the infidel world at large.
Two Muslim students have been expelled from an Islamic school in Melbourne for urinating and spitting on a Bible and setting it on fire.And this was followed by a notable lack of rioting and murder on the part of Christians around the world. Strangely, Newsweek is remarkably absent as well.
It has long been known cats can suffer from dementia.Translation, based on common experience:
Cats are demented.
A veiled Muslim woman will deliver this year's alternative Christmas speech on Channel 4, the broadcaster has said.Why is it that the words "snapshot of Britain's future" keep popping into my head?
This would be impressive, if it hadn't all come in tinsMain dishes:
- Effiloché de volaille en Parmentier (shredded chicken Parmentier)
- Dos d'espadon façon Riviera (Riviera style swordfish)
- Volaille épicée, sauté de légumes à la Thaï (spicy chicken with stir-fried Thai vegetables)
- Cailles rôties au Madiran (quails roasted in Madrian wine)
- Magret de canard confit, condiment aux câpres (duck breast confit with capers)
Side dishes:
- Carottes de sable au goût d'orange et coriandre (sand carrots with a hint of orange and coriander)
- Céleri rave en délicate purée à la noix de muscade (a light puree of celery with a hint of nutmeg)
- Caponata (tomato, aubergine and olive dip)
Desserts:
- Gâteau de semoule de blé fine aux abricots secs (semolina cake with dried apricots)
- Morceaux de pommes fondantes (apple fondant pieces)
- Far de l'espace Space (a Brittany 'far' tart)
- Rice pudding aux fruits confits (rice pudding with candied fruit)
Some academic lawyers see these alternative legal systems as an inevitable - and welcome - consequence of multiculturalism.Meanwhile, events on the other side of channel make one wonder is "welcome" is quite the word, as there are now 751 no-go areas in France that the police have effectively given over to the Jihadists.
Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.
All that said, the West is encountering something novel, as it fights its first politically-correct war, in which all the postmodern chickens of the 1980s and 1990s have come home to roost. Thus multiculturalism makes it hard to fight non-Europeans from the former third world, inasmuch as it argued there was not just little distinctively good about the West, but rather the once recognized universal sins of mankind—racism, sexism, class oppression, inequality, patriarchy—were to be seen as exclusively Western.I largely agree with VDH on this, but the key word in all this is "when." The longer it takes for the Left to wake up to the Jihadist threat, the harder it will be to defeat our enemies, the more expensive and bloodier will be our victory, and the larger will be the number of innocents who will suffer. When Hitler rattled his sabre over the Rheinland he could have been crushed by a stern look, but the civilised nations opted for appeasement and got the most destructive war in history as their reward.
If you have taught youth for generations that the story of World War II is Hiroshima and the Japanese internment, not Normandy, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, then how can you expect a nation to fight an enemy without making a mistake? And if dropping the bomb on Japan to stop its daily murdering of thousands in its collapsing empire, and to avoid something that would have made the horrific Battle for Berlin look like a cakewalk is equated with the Holocaust, how can the United States marshal the moral authority to press ahead, secure that its killing of jihadists is a different sort from jihadists killing the innocent or each other?
Add into this dangerous modernist soup moral equivalence, or what we know as “conflict resolution theory.” It postulates that any use of force de facto is equivalent to any other. We see those ripples with this Orwellian notion of “proportionality”, that a democratic Israel must calibrate its response to missiles aimed entirely at its civilians by ensuring none of its own aimed at Hezbollah terrorists and their supporters miss.
Then there is moral relativism and utopian pacifism. The latter is the idea that we have finally reached a sort of end of history, where our maturity and education and bounty have changed the rules of the game, relegating war to the Neanderthals. Relativism is even more pernicious because it is anti-empirical and suspends all moral judgment: Islam is just one of many religions given to excess, not at the heart of the vast majority of killing and fighting now going on in the world at this very hour, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Chechnya to Darfur to the West Bank to Lebanon to the Philippines to Indonesia to India and on and on. A Timothy McVeigh is not much different from an Osama bin Laden; forget the former was solitary and exceptional, the latter with millions of sympathizers and emblematic of an entire global movement. Both by their resort to terror were, presto, relatively the same.
So it is going to be hard, but not impossible, to win this war. Why,then, as readers have complained, my dogged optimism?
For two reasons. One, all these nostrums are theoretical, and anti-empirical. Ultimately as lies, they will be disapproved by the evidence before them. A progressive can call the ACLU all day long, but after 9/11 if he stands in line at an airport gate listening to an imam chanting Allah Akbar as he and his friends board, our liberal friend will begin to worry. And second, our enemies have no intention of relenting. They smell blood and want our carcass, so eventually even the progressive mind will give up the pieties of peace and face the inevitable.
Why do you refer to us as former Soviet Latvia? It's not who we are any more.In case anyone hasn't noticed, the USSR was a vile, expansionist police state that died fifteen years ago and good riddance. It's about time for "journalists" to either get over it or start habitually referring to all erstwhile parts of the Empire as "the former British colony" regardless of context.
There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.
It turns out that the ex-KGB colonel who was nearly assassinated in London wasn't just poisoned with thallium, but with what may be radioactive thallium.
Europe can be relaunched with Germany, Italy and Spain.Yes, the the Continent lead by three formerly Fascist states with France trailing behind and Britain refusing to surrender. It's 1940 all over again!
Something similar happened at this year’s Hay-on-Wye festival, sponsored by the Guardian, where a five-person panel discussed “Are there are any limits to free speech?” One of the Muslim panelists said if anyone offended his religion, he would strike him. A lawyer, Anthony Julius, responded that Jews had lived as minorities under two powerful hegemonies, Christian and Muslim, and had been obliged to learn how to deal nonviolently with offense caused to them by the sacred scriptures of both. He started by referring to an anti-Semitic passage in the New Testament — which passed without comment. But when he began to list the passages in the Koran that denigrate Jews, describing them as monkeys and pigs, the panelists went ballistic. One of them, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian, put her hand over the microphone and said words to the effect, “I am not going to sit here and listen to any criticisms of Muslims.” She was cheered, and not one of the journalists in the audience from right or left uttered a word about free speech — not hate speech, mind you, but free speech of a moderate nature.This is going to be a long war.
There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home, Weston-Super-Mare.
Well, my view of Europe in 20 years' time is that you'll be switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired -- and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.
Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.
